>Slug Life…and Eyeballs

>Ever since the Fall Frun, I’ve been a huge slug. I’ve been feeling a little off for the past few days, partially due to a trip to one of my many eye specialists on Monday. I’m in the process of working with an ocularist to have a scleral shell made for my left eye. Yes, after all these years I’ve finally put my big girl pants on and am admitting openly that I am partially blind. Ok, now that that’s out of the way…

Because I was born with an eye disorder and because I’ve had several surgeries over the years, I have a build up of scar tissue. I wear a hand-painted soft contact lens that matches my right eye and you really wouldn’t know the difference unless I told you. It’s just like wearing normal contact lenses except that it’s for cosmetic purposes only.

Well, because I usually have minor irritation in the white of my eye, I decided to seek out an alternative to the lens which led me to look into scleral shells. The shell is molded to the shape of your eye and unlike the contact lens that just covers the cornea, the shell covers the entire eye. It’s handmade from start to finish by an ocularist, of which there are only a handful in the world. Pretty cool, right?

My, what big eyes you have.

So, back to Monday. That was the day I had the mold of my left eye taken. It’s kind of like pouring concrete. A form is placed in your eye and a substance (same stuff used for dental impressions) is slowly injected into your eye. You wait a few minutes, it’s taken out, and you’re on your way. I was super nervous all day long but it turned out that it was no big deal. My eye has been extremely irritated ever since – very red, gushing like Niagara Falls, and just feels like it’s on fire (normal side effects). I’ve kept my lens out as much as possible and have been using a cold compress. Because of all this, I really haven’t felt like running. I THOUGHT I felt like running on Tuesday night – I even put my running clothes on and was all ready to go – but I changed 20 minutes later, sat on the couch and watched Vietnam in HD (nerd alert), and ate Halloween candy instead.

I finally got back out there tonight. Aside from my compression tights falling down every 5 minutes (how does that even happen?!) I’m glad I got out there. Especially after posting this on Facebook today:

No butt cracks here!

Do you ever have sluggish weeks and just need a break from running? Or is it better to just trudge through and tick off some miles?